Celts surpassing expectations under Stevens

First-year Celtics coach Brad Stevens has gotten his team to buy into, and fight for, its potential because he’s convinced players up and down the roster that he’s bought into them when few others would.

Celtics coach Brad Stevens could have been doing any one of a hundred things in advance of meeting the media following his team’s short workout last Tuesday in Waltham.

He could have pulled rank on second-year forward Jared Sullinger, who was holding court on the side of the practice parquet, and told him to wrap it up so the coach could speak. He could have disappeared through the trainer’s room and reacquainted himself with the facility he’d barely seen after a brutal month of travel. He could have dove into his game-planning for the Memphis Grizzlies, who were due in town the next night.

Instead, Stevens drifted to one of the baskets where little-used MarShon Brooks was going through a shooting drill. He then spent the better part of five minutes rebounding for the 14th player on his bench like he might have done during his first season as a volunteer assistant at Butler University 13 years ago.

It was one small example of how this first-year coach fresh out of mid-major college ball has managed to get an unbalanced roster of misplaced NBA veterans, unproven talents and holdovers from Boston’s most recent Big Three era into the top spot of the Atlantic Division six weeks into the season.

Stevens has gotten this team to buy into, and fight for, its potential because he’s convinced players up and down the roster that he’s bought into them when few others would.

"We’re 8-12 so it’s not like we’re setting the world on fire," he said following Tuesday’s victory over the Milwaukee Bucks. "But at end of the day we also had a tough month. Now we’ve got a chance to, hopefully, get our legs back and get back to playing and feeling fresh again."

That month included losing streaks of four and six games. But it largely included games where the team competed hard every night and was in most contests into the final minutes. After a preseason in which the Celtics looked lottery-bound, Stevens shortened the rotation, made some curious lineup changes and created a locker room full of players who no longer see any reason why they can’t contend for a top-four seed in the underachieving Eastern Conference.

"With some of the games that we lost, which we should have won, it’s good that we’re in the position we are now," guard Courtney Lee said. "We can only learn from it, and get better, and get those wins that we need to keep moving forward."

Stevens has exceeded most early expectations largely through putting players in positions where they can best succeed despite a month of November that included only six full practices.

He inserted Jordan Crawford as the starting point guard in a move that initially drew universal eye rolls but has since stabilized the offense. After experimenting with Avery Bradley at the point, Stevens moved him back to shooting guard where he has excelled offensively and recaptured the defensive spirit lost when he is forced to be a primary ball-handler.

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He has made Brandon Bass the focal point of the defense in the paint, turned Sullinger loose in what is shaping up to be a breakout season, and has possibly cracked the code of how to turn Jeff Green into a consistent force for perhaps the first time in his seven-year career.

Stevens wasn’t afraid to tell veteran forward Gerald Wallace — who twice early in the season called out his teammates for effort in what could have been seen as thinly veiled shots at his 37-year-old rookie coach — he was coming off the bench. He has kept Brooklyn Nets castoffs and pending free agents Keith Bogans, Kris Humphries and Brooks fully engaged and not disruptive through stretches where they haven’t played at all.

Stevens is smart enough to know he doesn’t have the championship contender he hopes to build over the course of his six-year contract. He knows that beyond the vacuum of mediocrity that is the Eastern Conference, winning 40 percent of your games doesn’t get you any prizes.

But he also knows what he was handed this summer and what he’s done with it over the first six weeks of the season. And he feels he can do a lot more with it over the final three-quarters of the campaign.

"We did a pretty good job through the first 20 games," he said. "And we can get better. We can be a lot better."

Scott Souza can be reached at 781-398-8006 or ssouza@wickedlocal.com. Follow him on Twitter @scott_souza.